Then everything went quiet.
Even I went quiet. Quiet in the head, quiet in the nerve endings. Snowstorm quiet.
And I felt the presence. I was not alone. It’s impossible to describe this sensation to those who are numb to such things, but there’s an involuntary quality to certain experiences, like the skin tingling that precedes vomiting. You can’t help but feel.
When I opened my eyes, the wolf stood about six feet from me. It looked more or less like the pictures I’d seen of wolves, save this one seemed shorter and more compact, almost dog-like. It gripped the ground with four giant paws, its fur quilled along its spine as though it had just emerged from the lake.
We stood there, the wolf and I. I kept my gaze on the ground, angled so that it appeared in my peripheral vision. I did not want to die surprised.
Staring at the wolf this way, however, I noticed that it was surrounded by a spiraling nimbus, one that coagulated for the span of an eye blink into the astral imprint of a black-haired woman.
Madame Ackermann.
I should have been terrified. I wasn’t. I was pissed. Her appearance registered as a physical space violation, as “unfair,” even though psychic attacks, to my knowledge, had no rules of engagement, there were no Geneva Convention guidelines to humanely shape one person’s cruelty toward another. Fine to kill me from the inside. But a wolf, an actual wolf, struck me as beyond the pale.
The wolf growled. It took two steps closer. It growled again.
“Go the fuck away,” I yelled. “Go the fuck away, leave me the fuck alone.”
The wolf pawed at the ground so viciously I heard the thick canvas sound of its footpads tearing.
“Leave me alone,” I said, holding my ground. “Leave me alone, you bitch.”
The wolf lurched — it intended to remove a chunk of my throat, I thought — but no. It bowed its head to the ground and made horrible noises, roiling gags that threatened to bring up an organ.
Jesus, I thought, watching it convulse. This was no monster; this was barely more than a plain animal, shivering in the astringent wind that, once freed from the toothy firs, gusted unobstructed across the stone.
To think I’ve been afraid of this, I thought. To think I’ve been afraid of you.
The astral swirl of Madame Ackermann was barely visible now, her hair dissipating into the air like smoke from an extinguished fire.
I reached out to touch its fur — whatever “it” was. Not to pet it, not to comfort it. Just to ascertain to what degree it was really there.
But the wolf backed away, reversing a few frightened paces. We stared at each other. The eyes — it would be wrong to say that I recognized them, more accurate to say that I recognized something in them. A flash of myself, a trapped and desperate filament of me.
I reached toward it again.
“Come here,” I said.
The wolf seemed caught between instincts, uncertain whether or not to flee.
“Come,” I repeated. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I’d like to think I meant it.
“What’s happening out here?” said Alwyn’s stepfather, exiting the ruin.
He saw the wolf. He froze.
“Don’t move,” he said.
He grabbed a crutch-length walking stick, whittled by a bored hiker and abandoned beside the doorway. He wielded it like a lance.
“Gehen Sie zuruck zu ihrem holz!” he yelled. He jabbed the stick toward the wolf’s muzzle.
“Careful!” I said. “It’s sick.”
The wolf reared back on its hind legs.
“Zuruck zu ihrem holz!” Alwyn’s stepfather yelled again.
The wolf turned, its body rolling over its ribs with a serpentine smoothness, and disappeared into the woods.
I experienced a tugging sensation in my chest; then a snapping, a sharp elastic recoil, followed by a dull pain.
I knelt on the granite. Tiny puddles of blood marked the wolf’s departure. I touched a wet, oblong spatter. The ache behind my ribs sped to a state of fibrillation, a symptom taking flight.
The ache subsided. And then I felt emptier than ever.
“My God,” said Alwyn’s stepfather. “How long was it standing there?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
He helped me up. As we started back down the mountain, I repeatedly swung my eyes backward. I wanted to see the wolf again.
“So,” I said. “What would Jung say?”
“Jung?”
“About the wolf.”
“Often the self is represented as a helpful animal,” he said. “But I imagine Jung would say you were lucky not to be killed.”
“By my own subconscious?”
I glanced behind us. Nothing followed us but wind.
“Wolves,” he muttered. “Wolves are the footmen of the weak.”
At the spa we were greeted with disbelief.
“There are no wolves in Breganz-Belken,” said the man who’d driven me from the train. He was, or so I guessed, the closest thing the spa had to a security guard.
Alwyn’s stepfather assured the man that we’d indeed seen a wolf.
“How big?” the man asked.
We estimated the size with our hands.
“As I said, we do not have wolves in Breganz-Belken,” he said. “The altitude is too much for them.”
I asked him about the wolf sounds that were piped into my room. Certainly this suggested that wolves were native to the area?
“Those are not wolves,” he said. “Those are lynxes.”
“It was sick,” I said.
“Rabies,” said the man. “Only a wolf that had lost its mind would come to Breganz-Belken.”
He regarded me meaningfully. I guessed that he’d been apprised of my schizophrenia diagnosis.
The man issued German orders to an underling with acne so severe it would seem grounds for firing.
The underling unlocked a nearby broom closet. He removed from it a long rifle.
The woman with the pearlized skin found me by the windows, watching the underling hike up-mountain with his gun.
“Do you believe I saw a wolf?” I asked her.
“As opposed to a lynx?” she asked.
“No, I mean … the exposure to energy frequencies after leaving the spa, I was wondering if maybe the wolf wasn’t an actual wolf.”
“You think it was a mirage,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, though the phrase in my head was visible thought forms. I recalled a comment Alwyn’s mother had made: your worst self loosed upon the world.
Had this wolf come for me or from me? I’d assumed the wolf was connected to Madame Ackermann; now I wasn’t so sure.
“But Herr Schweitzer, he saw the wolf as well,” she said.
“Who?”
“Your friend,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” I said. I’d never learned Alwyn’s stepfather’s name.
“Herr Schweitzer is not enrolled in the same therapy,” she said. “So I would think that your wolf was a wolf.”
“Except that there are no wolves at this altitude,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “it would be more true to say that there are not a lot of wolves at this altitude. We wouldn’t want to discourage the hikers.”
She withdrew some papers from her briefcase.
“As disappointed as I am that you were unable to honor the terms you agreed to,” she said, “I think that we can reach a fair termination resolution.”
The terms were this. I’d be expected to pay half of what I owed so long as I departed immediately and promised never to mention the wolf.
The pearlized-skin woman also agreed to give me a week’s worth of the supplements prescribed to successful test subjects.